24,795 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening


Thinking it may be a wild mustard - check this out...


Dave, thanks so much for your information. I do poke my fingers really deep into the soil to test. I'm going to twist the liners out with some pliers because the holes are plenty big enough to get most of it out. I'll just let it ride and see what happens this year for these buckets.


The clear bet is the sideways pics are from cell phones; some phones have wonky which-way-is-up info. If you are posting one of these, and you run it through pretty much any image application on your computer, that info will get rectified. If you are trying to look at someone else's sideways pic, try right clicking on the pic and choose the option that's something like "open image" or "view image in a new tab/window", whichever way your browser words it.
You could rotate your monitor...




> but after a few years of failed crops for various reasons I am trying to be extra vigilant this year.>
Vigilance is good but at some point we all have to accept that sometimes garden crops fail. It happens for lots of reasons and many of them are beyond our control. That's regardless of the size of the garden or how many years experience one may have. It is the very nature of gardening.
The perfect garden with a perfect harvest is an impossible dream. And focusing on that goal can quickly turn any of us into an obsessive-compulsive gardener inclined to panic and over-react. That not only takes all the fun out of gardening and defeats one of its primary purposes - relaxation and a sense of accomplishment - but it usually leads to actions that create more problems for us and for the garden.
Relax and enjoy your garden. Nature will take its course no matter how much you fight it.
Dave


Hi - the 'eggs' & ants are aphids plus ants could be feeding on the aphids' excrement (a.k.a. honeydew) - or on the plant's nectar. Okra has nectaries, I've learned, which are sort of pores on the plants that produce nectar. You can wash aphids & ants off w/ a hose. The aphids can do harm, since their feeding can damage/distort leaves & tissues, but ants by themselves won't harm okra by feeding on the nectar, in fact they may help as pollinators. I do not see ants in your photo, so they may be after the nectar & not the aphids' honeydew.
The holes in the okra leaves are definitely done by something else, but they look healed over to me, meaning the damage is old & pests are likely long gone. It could've been perpetrated by caterpillars, grasshoppers or slugs/snails, I think. The 'rule of thumb', BTW, is that plants can lose up to 1/3 of their foliage & still be OK.
It is hard to determine if that is upper or lower foliage on the tomatoes. I don't worry too much about damage on lower leaves, since they tend to get scraggly w/ age, but if it's on new growth @ the top, I think that may be cause for concern. I remove dead leaves regularly from my tomato plants.

According to this, maybe it's a mutation on chromosome 8 and/or 2. If you plant out alot of corn you'll see all sorts of interesting mutations.

I'd agree. Pollination is the problem. SVB will damage the entire plant.. not just the squash. The borer eats the plant from the inside.. so imagine the same symptoms in your plant if a large part of the main stalk was cut off... the plant would begin to die.. wilt.. if your fruit are dying and your plant is fine, try hand - pollinating and see what happens. If you don't know how: Take a male flower and pluck it from the plant. Pull the pedals from the flower, leaving just the little yellow stick covered in pollen in the center of the flower to the stem. Now take that pollen covered stamen, and rub it on the yellow part in the middle of the female flower (you can sing Marvin Gaye's "let's get it on" while you do :D ). Make sure to leave the female flower attached to the plant, and see if that helps.

I'm so glad to hear you think it may just be a pollination problem, that's easy enough to fix! I also have tomatoes growing fairly near by and no blossom end rot there, and they are on the same soaker hose so getting pretty consistent watering. I think I will try hand pollinating yellow one too, as it doesn't seem to be fruiting either, and while I often talk to my plants we will see what my new choice in music does for the garden :)



I "cured" a wilt disease by placing black plastic over a garden bed for approx three months, heat will kill germs, then took it off and planted new stuff all OK for now.
I did describe it to a smart fellow who runs a reputable nursery, and got the same advice I got here. He thanked me for NOT bringing it onto his property.
Interesting idea of heat treating with black plastic.